On 2002-02-13 16:03, "ext Eric van der Vlist" <vdv@dyomedea.com> wrote:
> Patrick Stickler wrote:
>> On 2002-02-13 15:31, "ext Eric van der Vlist" <vdv@dyomedea.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> PS: of course, if http://example.org/my-namespace.xml is a RDDL
>>> document, http://example.org/my-namespace.xml#foo might contain a
>>> documentation of what it really means...
>>>
>
> This was a PS and almost a joke :) !
Well, I couldn't be sure, and I see so many "Just use RDDL"
comments thinking that RDDL (however useful and great) is
some kind of panacea for the web which will make all relations
between resources clear... and that's getting to be a bit old.
> the main goal of my mail being to
> draw the attention on the lack of coherence between URIs as seen by
> XPointer, RDF and W3C XML Schema.
Fair enough. And apologies for replying only to your PS and
not making comment to the body of your message.
> ... when a resolvable URI is used I think that a RDDL
> document is the most sensible thing to host there.
Why? As I pointed out, a shared namespace does not equate to
shared semantics or shared description by all URIs grounded
in that namespace.
It's an issue of consistency and also of what is
really being described.
Since a namespace != doctype, != vocabulary, etc. etc.
we have to stop thinking that they are. If we need URIs
for doctypes, let's use them. If we need URIs for vocabularies,
let's use them. But a namespace is just punctuation.
What we need is a global metadata registry (or registries)
that provides access to knowledge by arbitrary URI, which
is expressed in standardized ontologies with consistent
semantics -- ideally expressed in RDF.
I.e. the ability to ask "What is this URI?" and be told
e.g. that it is an instance of a particular URI scheme
which itself is a member of a particular URI class
which has specific semantics (e.g. is non-dereferencable
and denotes abstract concepts) and that it constitutes
a term in a specific vocabulary and that vocabulary is
used by four particular doctypes and the term has
various descriptions and relations to other terms, etc.
etc.
You know, something like a Semantic Web... ;-)
(and, BTW, that's the practical, real-world, non-AI,
no pie-in-the-sky vision of the Semantic Web ;-)
Is that as easy as hooking RDDL to namespace URLs? Heck
no. Is it doable? Sure. Should we get on with it? Absolutely.
Cheers,
Patrick
--
Patrick Stickler Phone: +358 50 483 9453
Senior Research Scientist Fax: +358 7180 35409
Nokia Research Center Email: patrick.stickler@nokia.com